Arcserve UDP Part 4 – Recovery

So far in this series I have explained how to protect your data with Arcserve UDP, of course the reason for protecting your data is the ability to recover from any loss of data, so in this part of the UDP series I will discuss the recovery options with Arcserve UDP.

For me it is always been important that the recovery process should be easy and simple, the last thing you want is a complex recovery process at times of stress, it should be intuitive to use for all levels of backup administrators.

Arcserve UDP delivers an excellent set of methods to recover your data quickly such as:

File level recovery for Windows and Linux (agent based AND agentless based)

Granular Active Directory object and attribute level restore

Granular Exchange and Office 365 (email) object restore

SQL Database recovery

Virtual Machine recovery cross hyper-visor

Bare metal recovery (BMR)

Instant Virtual machine

Virtual standby (local and remote)

So let’s highlight a few recovery methods, first of all File level recovery.

Restoring files can be done in different ways, via the console, via the agent on the server (if present) and via the windows explorer.

When selecting a node from the resource list, you can select the machine and click restore, this will pop up a screen from the agent, or when an agentless backup is used the agent from the proxy. From here you can select a couple of options depending on the source machine. In my example I am restoring files from a Windows virtual machine.

When selecting Browse recovery points you can select the recovery points and browse through the system to find the files to restore

Select the files or folders to restore from the recovery point and click next

In my case I will select the original location and click next for the summary overview

When you click finish the restore starts.

This method works for both Windows and Linux machines and it does not matter if the backup used agents or done agentless.

As you can see this was pretty easy. UDP comes also with another excellent feature. As an admin you can actually browse the recover points on the backup server. If you open the file explorer in Windows and browse to your data store you can change the view of a node

This will change the view of the object and you are now able to double click this object.

And see your recover points, you can double click these to go through the recover point itself

Once your done, don’t forget to change the view back to Windows normal view, it wont affect the backup when you forget this, but it will affect the merge process if this recover point is about to merge into the parent (see post 1 of the series).

Virtual Machine Recovery

From the RPS console you can restore a complete virtual machine. In this example, one of my machines was destroyed by accident and when going in the console you can see that machine greyed out (centosvm02)

Right click the node or select the node and click actions to recover the entire vm and the wizard starts.

Select the Recover VM option from the wizard

Select your recovery point, by default the latest recovery point is selected. You can decide to restore to the same or alternate location and set some options for resolving conflicts and power on.

Once set, you can view the summary and start the recovery:

The recovery process starts and you can follow the progress in the jobs tab on the console:

And when the job is finished you can check the logs in the logs section.

As you can see, this is all pretty straight forward and works very easy in a few clicks.

Bare Metal Recovery / Cross Hyper-visor recovery

To recover a physical machine or a virtual machine from another hyper-visor you can use the BMR

BMR requires you to create a ISO or USB Image first, You can create the BMR boot kit on the RPS console:

You can create the boot kit as an ISO or as USB image and place on the medium of choice or upload to a hyper-visor.

In my scenario, I want to restore a Windows virtual machine that was on Hyper-V to be recovered in my VMware environment.

I will start the by creating an empty virtual machine in vCenter and boot from my BMR ISO.

A wizard will start and from here you can start your recovery

In this screen you have two options, restore from a backup or from a virtual machine. The latter one is used those scenarios, that your source machine went down and you started the machine as an Instant virtual machine, you then have time to source new hardware or create a new virtual machine on your platform to recover from.

Instant virtual machines run from the backup image and therefor it should always be a temporary solution!

In our scenario we will choose to restore from a backup

In this screen, I can choose from browsing a network path or a RPS server, I will choose the RPS server. With the Utilities button in the left bottom corner you can setup your network if you would like to add manual information. In my case the DHCP picked my adapter and I am in the correct subnet.

First of all, fill in the credentials of your RPS server and click connect, once done correctly you can than browse through the datastores and recovery points. I am selecting w2k12r2vm02 which is a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Once selected you than have the option to choose the retention recovery point

In this scenario we will choose the latest recovery point

Select if you want to use express or advanced mode. Advanced mode will provide you options such as basic or dynamic disks or inject additional drivers before the reboot.

A summary is displayed and click OKto start the restore

Again this process can be monitored via the console as well

Once the restore is finished the wizard will help you guide driver injection if the source and target was different, in my case from hyper-v to VMware does provide different drivers in the operating system. The wizard will suggest any drivers if available or if not you will have the option to manually add these.

When done, it is time to reboot

And your machine is ready to use

All in all, you have a great tool set with UDP to recover data easily and quickly in a simple matter.

At the Arcserve website there is a full description of all restore options click here to see the options.

In my next post I will go into IVM and VSB as this is worth a full post on its own.